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Political Science
USA
2023

D-Index & Metrics

Political Science

D-Index
57
Citations
12590
World Ranking
144
National Ranking
88

Research.com Recognitions

  • 2023 - Research.com Political Science in United States Leader Award
  • 2018 - Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Overview

R. Michael Alvarez is affiliated with the California Institute of Technology in the United States and has a research portfolio concentrated within the social sciences. Their work spans multiple subfields, including sociology and political science, artificial intelligence, political science and international relations, communication, as well as statistics and probability.

Their main research topics focus primarily on electoral systems and political participation, climate change communication and perception, digital games and media, social media and politics, misinformation and its impacts, computational and text analysis methods, and environmental education and sustainability.

Alvarez has contributed to a significant number of publications in notable venues. These frequently include

  • arXiv (Cornell University)
  • Social Science Quarterly
  • SSRN Electronic Journal
  • Frontiers in Political Science
  • PLoS ONE

Among recent papers authored or co-authored by Alvarez are:

  • "Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries," 2025, Nature Human Behaviour
  • "The politics of vaccine hesitancy in the United States," 2021, Social Science Quarterly
  • "Voting Experiences, Perceptions of Fraud, and Voter Confidence," 2021, Social Science Quarterly
  • "Hidden Donors: The Censoring Problem in U.S. Federal Campaign Finance Data," 2020, Election Law Journal Rules Politics and Policy
  • "Social media enables people-centric climate action in the hard-to-decarbonise building sector," 2022, Scientific Reports

Frequent collaborators include Ramit Debnath, Jacob Morrier, Daniel Ebanks, Jian Cao, and Seo-young Silvia Kim, reflecting a diverse network of academic partnerships.

Alvarez's book publications include titles appearing with Cambridge University Press and the California Institute of Technology. Notably, they authored "Securing American Elections" (2020) with Cambridge University Press and "Securing American Elections: How Data-Driven Election Monitoring Can Improve Our Democracy" (2020) with the California Institute of Technology.

In recognition of their scholarly contributions, Alvarez was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

Best Publications

  • Hard Choices, Easy Answers: Values, Information, and American Public Opinion

    R. Michael Alvarez;John Brehm

  • GOVERNMENT PARTISANSHIP, LABOR ORGANIZATION, AND MACROECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

    R. Michael Alvarez;Geoffrey Garrett;Peter Lange

  • When Politics and Models Collide: Estimating Models of Multiparty Elections

    R. Michael Alvarez;Jonathan Nagler

  • American Ambivalence Towards Abortion Policy: Development of a Heteroskedastic Probit Model of Competing Values

    R. Michael Alvarez;John Brehm;Stable Url

  • Information and elections

    R. Michael Alvarez

  • A New Approach for Modelling Strategic Voting in Multiparty Elections

    R. Michael Alvarez;Jonathan Nagler

  • Information and Elections

    Unknown

  • The Foundations of Latino Voter Partisanship: Evidence from the 2000 Election

    R. Michael Alvarez;Lisa García Bedolla

  • Economics, Entitlements and Social Issues: Voter Choice in the 1996 Presidential Election

    R. Michael Alvarez;Jonathan Nagler

  • Are Americans Ambivalent Towards Racial Policies

    R. Michael Alvarez;John Brehm

  • Internet Voting in Comparative Perspective: The Case of Estonia

    R. Michael Alvarez;Thad E. Hall;Alexander H. Trechsel

  • The Race Gap in Student Achievement Scores: Longitudinal Evidence from a Racially Diverse School District

    Valentina A. Bali;R. Michael Alvarez

  • Strategic Voting In British Elections

    R. Michael Alvarez;Frederick J. Boehmke;Jonathan Nagler

  • Explaining the gender gap in U.S. presidential elections, 1980-1992

    Carole Kennedy Chaney;R. Michael Alvarez;Jonathan Nagler

  • Deficits, Democrats, and Distributive Benefits: Congressional Elections and the Pork Barrel in the 1980s

    R. Michael Alvarez;Jason L. Saving

  • Issues, Economics, and the Dynamics of Multiparty Elections: The British 1987 General Election

    R. Michael Alvarez;Jonathan Nagler;Shaun Bowler

  • Are Americans Confident Their Ballots Are Counted

    R. Michael Alvarez;Thad E. Hall;Morgan H. Llewellyn

  • Party System Compactness: Measurement and Consequences

    R. Michael Alvarez;Jonathan Nagler

  • Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting

    R. Michael Alvarez;Thad E. Hall

  • Uncertainty and Political Perceptions

    R. Michael Alvarez;Charles H. Franklin

  • The Likely Consequences of Internet Voting for Political Representation

    R. Michael Alvarez;Jonathan Nagler

  • Two-Stage Estimation of Nonrecursive Choice Models

    R. Michael Alvarez;Garrett Glasgow

  • Electronic Elections: The Perils and Promises of Digital Democracy

    R. Michael Alvarez;Thad E. Hall

  • Controlling Democracy: The Principal–Agent Problems in Election Administration

    R. Michael Alvarez;Thad E. Hall

  • Speaking in Two Voices: American Equivocation about the Internal Revenue Service

    R. Michael Alvarez;John Brehm;Stable Url

  • Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation

    R. Michael Alvarez;Thad E. Hall;Susan D. Hyde

  • Congressional Committees and the Political Economy of Federal Outlays

    R. Michael Alvarez;Jason L. Saving

  • Subject Acquisition for Web-Based Surveys

    R. Michael Alvarez;Robert P. Sherman;Carla VanBeselaere

  • The diffusion of internet voting. Usage patterns of internet voting in Estonia between 2005 and 2015

    Kristjan Vassil;Mihkel Solvak;Priit Vinkel;Alexander H. Trechsel

  • Issues, Economics, and the Dynamics of Multiparty Elections:

    R. Michael Alvarez;Jonathan Nagler

  • Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data

    R. Michael Alvarez

Frequent Co-Authors

Jonathan Nagler
Jonathan Nagler New York University
D. Roderick Kiewiet
D. Roderick Kiewiet California Institute of Technology
Alexander H. Trechsel
Alexander H. Trechsel University of Lucerne
Stephen Ansolabehere
Stephen Ansolabehere Harvard University
Ralph Adolphs
Ralph Adolphs California Institute of Technology
Geoffrey Garrett
Geoffrey Garrett University of Southern California
Nathaniel Beck
Nathaniel Beck New York University
Anima Anandkumar
Anima Anandkumar Nvidia (United Kingdom)

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Related Online Degrees & Career Pathways

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